https://bats-core.readthedocs.io/en/stable/writing-tests.html#load-share-common-code states that using load with a script that has declares will result in the declares not being globally visible. I ran into this and found the above docs section after running around in circles a bit. Setting -g on the declare seems to have fixed the immediate problem. It would be nice if the gotchas page also had a reference to this.